Deeplinks Blog posts about WIPO

EFF is in Geneva this week at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), where the organization's Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights is gathered to debate proposals for a treaty to give new legal rights to broadcasters, and for instruments that would standardize copyright limitations and exceptions for libraries, archives, educators and researchers.

More about those proposals will be coming in a series of updates this week. But first, why are we at WIPO at all? Here's a short history lesson to explain.

Member states of the United Nations concluded the draft of an international treaty this week that gives people with visual and reading disabilities better access to copyrighted works. The treaty comes as the result of collective efforts to carve out protections for the blind and reading disabled that faced years of resistance from rightsholder industries. Drafting efforts spanned nearly a decade at the UN World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), culminating in a final session in Marrakesh, Morocco running from June 17 until they finalized the treaty on Tuesday.

This month, the former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Commerce Bruce Lehman, sometimes referred to as the architect of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”), spoke at a Silicon Valley conference that brought copyright experts together to discuss the impact of that law 15 years later.

At the conference, Lehman admitted the law was the product of a deliberate end-run around the democratic process. Lehman was an advocate for several hardline proposals to criminalize digitial rights management (DRM) circumvention. Unable to sell the proposals domestically, Lehman pressed the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) to propose them at the UN World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) instead. Many have accused Lehman of using the treaty process to avoid Congress. What was Lehman’s response to those accusations at the event? “I would say that they're right.”

Last Friday, the World Intellectual Property Organization’s (WIPO) 185 country-members concluded another round of negotiations on exceptions and limitations for the blind and persons with printing disabilities. However, they did not reach a consensus on many of its most contentious issues, such as allowing exports of adapted works across borders and circumventing technological protection measures to enable accessibility. People with hearing disabilities were also written out of the draft. In addition, US negotiators were able to block exceptions and limitations for audiovisual works, under the pressure of MPAA. Who loses? All of us, but especially the 285 million visually impaired people in the world.